


in the stillness of remembering

by peacefrog



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Angst, Dreams, M/M, Pining, Post-Episode: s04e06 A Timeline and Place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 21:09:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17988575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peacefrog/pseuds/peacefrog
Summary: Quentin dreamed of Fillory, in a time before he was born.





	in the stillness of remembering

Quentin dreamed of Fillory, in a time before he was born. The mosaic under his hands, the aching of his fingers. Garden dirt on the soles of his shoes and a laughter ringing high from just beyond the cottage. His son sprinting quickly as his little legs could carry him and somewhere his wife was singing.

Eliot beside him, his callused fingertips drawing two tiles together and reaching for a third. The air heavy with the scent of Fillorian flowers. Eliot moving nearer now and touching him with those hands.

The tinny sound of his alarm was a nuisance, and Quentin couldn’t remember why he’d set it to begin with as he groped for his phone in the dark. He could never hold onto these dreams for long. Eliot would touch him and he would be gone. His skin thrumming with the memory-dream, Quentin powered down his phone and tossed it back onto the bedside table, and, drawing the covers back up over his head, he wished for dreams to return.

—

Quentin dreamed of childhood, sitting cross legged on his narrow bed, Fillory and Further spread open in his lap, adventure awaiting, the echo of a love laid in pages that he would not understand for years to come. He woke with the taste of Fillorian wine so sweet on his tongue he felt drunk with it. He rushed to the sink and gulped down handfuls of water before forcing his aching bones into a lukewarm bath.

Quentin sighed and shut his eyes. Back in Fillory they’d bathed in a stream near the mosaic before a talking fish came along and told them where they might barter for a working tub for their cottage. And later, after that first anniversary night had broken wide open that which had been unspoken between them for years, Eliot made love to him on the banks of that stream, their bodies moving in time with its gentle motion.

“Am I still not supposed to be overthinking this?” Quentin had asked, watching starlight play on Eliot’s skin.

Eliot sighed and turned to him. “The whole point of this, Q, was to empty the thoughts from your head. Clearly I’m not getting the job done.”

Quentin smirked and pressed his bare skin to Eliot’s “Well.” He dragged his lips along the hollow of Eliot’s throat. “Guess we’ll just have to try again.”

A knock at the bathroom door wrenched Quentin away from his memories. His bathwater had gone cold. 

“Q?” Julia’s muffled voice came through the door. “Everything all right in there?”

“Fine,” he shouted, perhaps a bit too loudly. “Be out in a second.”

Quentin pulled the stopper with his toes and stayed shivering in the tub until all the water had drained out. And somewhere in the back of his mind, a whisper. _This is what you deserve._ Cold air and little comfort. Julia knocked again and Quentin relented, dragging himself from the tub and tugging his clothes back on.

He pushed past Julia on his way back to the room but she caught him by the arm. “You ready to talk about it?”

“What’s there to talk about?”

Julia frowned. “We can’t just pretend that what happened last night didn’t happen.”

Quentin’s shoulder ached, the one that could still feel anything at all. He sighed and stared down at his cold feet. “I’m not pretending, Jules.” 

“Don’t shut me out.”

“I’m not shutting you out.”

“Why are we really doing this?”

“Because Eliot is our friend. And he would do the same for us.”

Quentin walked away, feeling Julia’s eyes on him as he made his way back over to the bed.

“You can’t go back to sleep,” she said. “We have work to do.”

“Just another hour, okay? I’m—Please. I just need another hour.”

Julia said nothing, her sad face disappearing behind the closing door, and Quentin collapsed down onto the bed. He could be strong for Eliot, would be, but for now, Quentin wanted to be weak. Needed to be. 

_Let me have him for just an hour, please. Just one hour more._

He squeezed his eyes shut but sleep wouldn’t come. He tossed and kicked and thrashed and lay as still as he could be, willing his mind to conjure the memory of Eliot’s skin on his skin. And before he knew it an hour had passed, and Julia was all but dragging him out of the bed.

“Come on,” she said, taking Quentin by the arm and leading him to the dining table. “Made your eggs just how you like them. Got a head-start on reading up on Heka’s loot.”

Quentin rubbed the exhaustion from his eyes and took a seat at the table. “Any luck?” He asked knowing what the answer would be. He stabbed his eggs with the tines of his fork and watched the yolks bleed brightly out onto the plate.

“Not yet. But we’ll get there. Today’s going to be our day, Q, I can feel it.”

“Right,” Quentin said flatly, eyes scanning the stacks of books covering half the table. He ate his eggs and washed the dishes and joined Julia back at the table.

“Don’t give up,” she said, drawing his eyes away from the backs of his own hands.

“I’m not giving up, Jules, but these books aren’t getting us anywhere, and we hit a dead-end online and I just don’t know why we’re still—”

“Q.”

“Jules.”

“I know that you care about him but falling down in this hole isn’t going to get us any closer to saving him. Stay with me, okay?”

Quentin sighed and reached for a book, dragged it toward him and flipped it open without looking at the cover. “I’m here. I’m here,” he mumbled absently. He could feel Julia’s eyes on him as the words on the page all jumbled together.

They scoured books for hours, went back over web pages they’d already picked to pieces the night before, coming up just as empty as before they began. Emptier. Quentin felt the weight of it sinking like a stone in his belly. 

“Maybe we should go back to Brakebills,” Julia suggested, and Quentin hated the pity she never could hide from her face.

“We already took every book they had to offer even remotely related to Heka or the looting of god-tombs.”

Quentin rested his head in his hands. He just wanted to go back to sleep. He was trying so hard to be strong, wanted to be, but as the hours of the day ticked on he could feel strength ebbing from him surely as the moon draws back the tide. Night fell quickly as the day had broken, and the monster with his stolen face didn’t come.

—

Quentin collapsed down onto the sofa. “Jules, I have a… request. And I need you to not ask too many questions.”

Julia furrowed her brow and curled up next to him. “Request away, but I’m not making any promises.”

“Look, I just… I need a spell for sleeping. Dreams, really. Uh…”

“Q…”

“Don’t look at me like that. I just—I know that you learned things from Marina. You got in my head before.”

“Q I don’t have magic right now you know that.”

“Then give me something I can do on myself.”

Julia clenched her jaw and leaned in close. “Q, I’m not locking you inside your own mind. You have to tell me what’s going on right now.”

Quentin scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’m not asking you to. But there has to be a spell, something you can give me to stay in a dream. A memory. Just for a little while.”

“I might have something.” Julia tentatively took Quentin’s face in her hands. “But you have to tell me why.”

Quentin’s stomach lurched, then clenched tightly as a fist. “Because I miss him.”

“Eliot?”

A sob caught in Quentin’s throat. “Yes.”

“Oh, Q.” She pulled Quentin into her arms and held him close. “Shit. Okay. It’s gonna be okay. I know a lucid dreaming spell that you can try.”

Quentin sighed and shut his eyes, allowed himself the comfort of her touch. “Thank you.”

—

The spell was simple, required hardly any magic. Quentin enchanted himself and lay in the bed, gazing at the ceiling to watch shadows move. And then the shadows turned to light, and the high ceiling above him melted away. He blinked. He was back in the cottage, in Fillory, in the bed that had known the shape of his body so well. He turned his head on the pillow. Eliot was beside him, blinking himself awake.

He remembered this day well. Their son had gone away the day before and they’d spent all night making love as loudly as they wanted. Eliot smiled, draped an arm over Quentin’s chest.

“Morning.” Eliot moved nearer, burying his face in the crook of Quentin’s neck.

This is how it went: Eliot kissed his neck, pressed his hand to the center of Quentin’s chest, said, “Time for round four. Or is it five? Six? Seven?” They laughed and Eliot straddled Quentin’s hips, looked down at him with eyes bright as Fillorian stars. His hair was graying at the temples and he was beautiful with aging, the lines around his eyes evidence of their years spent together. Quentin’s hands made their way up Eliot’s thighs, found their way to his arousal, an instinct now as much as a desire.

Muscle memory. This didn’t feel like a dream, not like before. Quentin could feel himself there in the bed and Eliot on his skin, gliding slickly through his hand. Eliot smiled and moaned. “Do you remember that night we gave each other magic handjobs? No touching just…”

“I prefer it this way,” Quentin assured him.

“Oh, I know you do. I know.” 

Eliot had his hands on Quentin now, stroking him slowly, quickly, slowly again. They rocked their bodies together in the rhythm of a song composed over years of endless days. Quentin wanted to remember this, needed to, hoped against hope to take it back with him, wear it like a perfume on his skin. He felt drunk with it, head swimming, Eliot’s lips on his lips.

It didn’t always happen this way, but on this morning they came together, quaking together on their sweat-drenched sheets. Eliot’s long limbs tangled with his and they sighed easily knowing that the puzzle could wait, would wait for them, had been waiting for so many mornings. 

Eliot smiled against Quentin’s shoulder. “I’m gonna make you breakfast,” he drawled. “Just as soon as I can remember how to move my legs.”

Quentin thought his chest might burst with the fullness of it all, the perfect bliss of this moment. “This is going to be a good day, isn’t it?”

“The best. The best.” Eliot laughed softly. “I’m going to fuck you on the mosaic.”

Quentin laughed out loud. “Haven’t done that in a while.”

“The beauty of all life.”

Quentin hummed and happily shut his eyes, finding Eliot’s lips, kissing him sweetly. He knew what was going to happen next, couldn’t fight it, drifting off to sleep and waking again with a gasp, shaking and soaking through the sheets of his borrowed bed. The darkness of the room draped over him like a shroud, Quentin pressed his face into the pillow and pulled the scent of Eliot’s hair into his lungs. It was unmistakable, and Quentin wanted to drink it down until his body was full to bursting.

The spell didn’t work again after that, but Quentin didn’t need it to. Eliot stayed with him, in his nose and on his skin, through the darkest parts of the night, and Quentin slept soundly, dreaming of nothing at all.

—

“I think I found it,” Julia said triumphantly over coffee the next morning. “We’ve been looking at this all wrong.”

Hope surged through Quentin like a pulse. “Tell me.”

“Okay, so you remember the yellow fruit. Mandrake root, right? Look at this.” Julia turned her laptop screen to Quentin. “Six months ago, record-setting mandrake roots started popping up all over this town just outside of Plattsburgh. No one knows why, it shouldn’t be growing anywhere near there.”

“Shit. That’s not far.”

“Not far at all. Almost like…”

“If you say fate…” Quentin couldn’t help but smile.

“Come on. Get dressed. We’re going on a field trip to Plattsburgh.”

“Said no one ever.” Quentin laughed, strength returning to him easily as breathing, the memory of a dream that was reality carrying him gently into the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> Quentin Coldwater and Eliot Waugh are turning me into an even bigger sap than usual, if that's at all possible. I am a ruined woman and will certainly be writing so much more for these two. In the meantime, come say hi on [tumblr.](http://crossroadscastiel.tumblr.com) <3


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